The Last Good Blue-Collar Job?

A journalist from a Scottish newspaper contacted me last month wanting my reaction to the announcement that 2,300 people had applied for eighteen trainee driver posts to service a soon to be reopened rail line in the Scottish Boarders running to the south of Edinburgh. With nearly 128 applicants for each of these jobs, the reporter was keen to discover what was behind this headlong rush. Well, to be precise, what I think she was after were some conditioned clichés about working on the railway, the romance of the iron road, and how it is (still) every little boy’s wish to be a train driver.

She seemed a little crestfallen when I suggested some alternative reasons why these new posts might be so valued.  First, the trainee’s starting salary was $33,230, about average in the UK before you take in to account the rise to $58,400 when fully qualified. I also suggested that recruits could expect a good pension, reduced travel prices, and, above all, the kind of security that many workers can only dream of. This is all in the context of a double dip recession and high unemployment levels. By this time, I could sense that young journalist’s imagined simple story of boyhood romance was morphing into something far more complex and probably less exciting.

She tried one last tack with me. ‘But why’ she asked, ‘were these jobs so good’? My answer was straightforward; railway work in the UK remains one of the strongest bastions of working-class unionisation. When the industry was privatised, or denationalised, two decades ago, conservative politicians made little attempt to hide that their goals included smashing the unions, reducing levels of pay, and eroding conditions of service. Contrary to the conservatives’ hopes, some railway workers have seen their real pay rates increase considerably, and this is especially true of the drivers.

Hot on the heels of the story about the new railway jobs came a similar story from the English Midlands about 1,701 people applying for three full-time and five part-time barista posts with coffee chain Costa Coffee. In other words, these more mundane, less obviously ‘romantic’ vacancies attracted more applicants per position – roughly 212 applicants for each job — than did the train driver openings. Among the biggest differences between the two jobs is the pay rate.  An article in the Guardian pointed out that no barista in London, let alone in the more economically deprived Midlands, gets within ten grand of the national average wage of £26,500.  Another key difference is that driving a train requires a year or more of theoretical and practical training while – and no offence to baristas anywhere – serving coffee does not involve a lengthy apprenticeship, much as some of us may want to fetishize its production. The relatively greater interest in the barista jobs may reflect many things, but it is fundamentally a function of the poorly performing economy and the dire labor market in the UK.

Underlying both stories is a common question that must confuse the presumably middle-class newspaper readership: why would so many people want to do blue-collar work? One answer to this question might lie in reflections being made about working- and middle-class aspiration on both sides of the Atlantic, reflections that reassess the value of blue-collar work.  The most prominent example comes from US writer Matthew B. Crawford’s bestseller Shop Class as Soulcraft, subtitled An Inquiry into the Value of Work. Crawford’s basic thesis is that the middle-class obsession with getting the ‘good job’ often ends in a cubicle.  It may be a very nice cubicle, in which one may be able to exercise all sorts of autonomy over the type of posters and humorous postcards placed on its walls, but it’s still a cubicle. Crawford contrasts life slumped in front of a screen between cardboard dividers with the freedom and autonomy still enjoyed by many working-class jobs.  He makes much of his own chosen career in motorcycle maintenance, in which he enjoys endless problem solving mixed with extensive banter with other motorcycle aficionados. While Crawford enters this world from a background of relative educational and financial privilege, he does tap into something about the too often hidden rewards of working-class working life, namely the culture of workplaces shaped by ordinary men and women.

Similar revelations can be found in other accounts of middle-class forays into working-class culture, such as Don J. Snyder’s The Cliff Walk: A Job Lost and a Life Found. Snyder recounts how he lost a tenure-track college post and descended down the class ladder. In a fascinating story, he relates how he found redemption through labor with a set of working-class builders who overlooked his technical incompetence because they could see he needed the job. Snyder contrasts the basic humanitarian gesture involved in helping out someone in need with his experience of the middle-class world he had fallen from where many former friends and colleagues had simply turned their backs on him.

In my current job, I am occasionally contacted by the media about the current state of work, and not just about railways. Much like my students, journalists seem to assume that manual labor or blue-collar work is to be avoided at all costs. I always make a point of asking the often young journalist or assistant researchers about their own work and the conditions they enjoy. Usually, they describe a long-hours culture, working on temporary contracts, switching between employers who contract to bigger media players. To these younger media workers, the working-class world of blue-collar work must seem a strangely alien one, where workers more often co-operate than compete and place emphasis on the importance of dignity and respect for a job well done. No wonder they want to produce stories about this type of old-fashioned work.

Tim Strangleman

Home Health Workers: In Demand But Not Protected

In the nearly 20 years I’ve spent organizing long term care workers, I hadn’t really personally experienced the difficulty of being a care giver.   I worked the policy, political, advocacy, organizing and bargaining pieces in the Union for home care workers.  The women I organized were strong and bold and everyone had a story to tell. We told their stories of care giving in the hope that the workforce would no longer remain invisible and would begin to be seen as the emerging face of the labor movement along with immigrants and service workers.

I have a story to tell as well now.  My mom and dad are in their 80s and in poor health.  Caring for them is the most difficult work I have performed in my life, both mentally and physically.  I moved back home two years ago to care for them.  Ten years ago I used to fear that they would die.  Now I fear that they will live. Each day brings its own lessons in compassion, like when I wake up in the morning and there is no hot water to shower because Mom got up in the middle of the night and left the water running, or, when I am ready to walk out the door to take my son to pre-school and Dad’s colostomy bag breaks and I have a mess to clean up.  Then Dad begins to cry, I try to comfort him, and my son is late for school.   I think back to the women I’ve organized and look to them for strength. I do this for free, which prevents me from working full-time elsewhere, but the workers who did this for a living, mostly women and people of color, really aren’t doing much better financially.

Home health workers are among the most in demand but lowest paid workers in America.  There are 2.5 million caregivers in the workforce, and that number will grow over the next decade because of aging baby boomers, many of whom seem to prefer to receive care at home. Employment in care giving is expected to grow by 70% from 2010 to 2020, much faster than average for all occupations. Over one million workers in this industry have no health insurance. 90% of direct care workers are women, and many are primary breadwinners in their families. Caregivers are paid minimum wage or, if they’re lucky, just slightly above.  Earning such low wages with no health insurance means that 46% of direct care workers rely on some type of government program, such as food stamps, Medicaid, housing, child care, energy assistance, or transportation assistance.

Over one million direct care workers are consigned to near-poverty because of the structure of their employment. The home care workers bathe, change, dress, and feed their clients.  They also perform home-making duties, such as cooking, cleaning, and shopping. These workers face whatever they have to, depending on the kind of day their clients may be having.  Even if the home care agency tells them that they have one hour to get a client dressed, fed, and settled in his/her chair for the day, it may take longer.  But workers do not leave their clients.  Instead, they work “off the clock.”  A home care worker may have four clients for the day but does not get paid for mileage or travel time between clients, much less any benefits for themselves. If the worker’s client becomes ill and is admitted to the hospital, admitted to the nursing home for further care, or dies, or if the family takes the client to their home for the holidays, the worker simply loses that job and does not get paid.  There are no sick days and no vacation days.

Home care workers may be employed by an agency or be independent providers. In either case, the work environment includes a number of safety and health hazards: blood-borne pathogens and biological hazards, latex sensitivity, ergonomic hazards from client lifting, violence, hostile animals, and unhygienic and dangerous conditions.  They may also face hazards on the road as they drive from client to client.

Unfortunately, these workers have been denied the right to organize and bargain in some states, like Ohio. Home care workers are also excluded from the Fair Labor Standards Act, making them ineligible for overtime, including overnight stays at a client’s home. President Obama spent a day working as a home care worker in California not long after announcing his candidacy in 2007.  Last year, the President proposed a revising a Labor Department rule that would provide FLSA protections to home care workers, and the final rule is still being deliberated.  Guess who opposes the rule change?  The home care agencies.  Agencies receive at least $15 billion of Medicaid money annually for personal care services and are happy to have government money, which fueled a 9% average yearly increase in revenue between 2001 and 2009.  Government becomes harmful, it seems, only when setting a floor under workers’ wages.  The fight isn’t about raising the minimum wage or getting overtime legalized-that would still leave home care workers poor.  It’s about winning some labor standards, rights, and security after decades of losing them.

What happens to this growing element of the working class matters for the shape of our economy, the fate of unionism, and the establishment of a decent standard of living for all.

Debra Timko

Debra Timko was a leading health care organizer for 20 years and is now an independent health care researcher studying the lives of health care workers in Northeast Ohio

Restoring Traditional America

Over the weekend The Daily Kos highlighted a cartoon from Tom the Dancing Bug (cartoonist Rueben Bolling) that responded to Bill O’Reilly’s election night claim that Obama’s win signaled the death of traditional America. According to O’Reilly, “the demographics are changing, it’s not a traditional American anymore.” Bolling wondered what would happen if Barack Hussein Obama traveled back in time to the world of Leave it to Beaver. In this imaginary scenario, Obama tells the Cleavers of his plan to raise the marginal tax rate on the wealthiest Americans, reduce the gap between CEO pay and that of the lowest paid employees, and bolster the social safety net. The “Beave” and his family point out that those features were already in place in their traditional 1960s America. “Golly, mister,” the Beave exclaims, “I think you’re bringing back traditional America.”

I do, too. I am writing a book about how workers and unions were represented in 1950s popular culture.  In Striking Images: Labor Unions on Screen and in the Streets in the 1950s, I argue that workers were represented in popular culture more often, and more positively, than we remember. This is, in part, because union membership was at its highest point in U.S. history (roughly 35% of all US households). Unions were also active, not passive. There were more than 30,000 strikes over the course of the 1950s.  In other words, union membership was traditional.

For example, in 1965 Eisenhower, declared that “the protection of the right of workers to organize into unions and to bargain collectively is the firm and permanent policy of the Eisenhower Administration.” Rachel Maddow once quipped about Eisenhower’s relatively liberal policies that she was “in almost total agreement with the Eisenhower-era Republican party platform.”

As we return to a more traditional America, how are ordinary workers being represented in popular culture? This is a question we often ask on this blog, and we make our share of withering critiques, as Susan Ryan did when she addressed the phenomenon of “extreme work” reality television and how workers are being exploited in front of and behind the camera.

But there are some other more positive, and possibly even authentic ways in which workers are being represented in popular culture. Here’s a quick run down:

Striking workers are back in the news. Thanks to the massive (and largely successful) Chicago teacher’s strike and a well-organized blitz of Black Friday job actions at Walmarts across the country, the mainstream media has been covering strikes with more sympathy than in years past. Do a search for “Black Friday” and “workers” and more than 2 million hits pop up. While some of the coverage of Black Friday’s job actions underplayed the overall impact of the Walmart actions, other headlines suggested the range and the power of the strikes which took place in more than 100 cities in 46 states.

The Ed Show. Ed Schultz, the one time sports broadcaster and conservative shock jock now spins his blue-collar bluster in a more progressive direction on MSNBC every weeknight at 8:00 PM. Schultz starts every show with the tag line “Let’s get to work.” If you were watching The Ed Show last week you would have seen coverage of the raw deal that Hostess workers were given in the Twinkie show down, a piece about the unionization of exotic dancers, a report on a union on the rise in Phoenix, Arizona, and an exposé on what Walmart really pays its workers. You won’t find this much working-class related news in video form in one place anywhere else.

Blue: America at Work and Blue: Portrait of an American Worker. In a coincidence of naming, two photographers of the contemporary American labor scene have titled their projects “Blue.” Ian Wagreich’s Blue: America at Work was “kickstarted” in August and includes stunning black and white portraits of American workers in industrial settings. The photographs are visually gorgeous, and they are as much as about aestheticizing the industrial landscape as they are about giving a voice to individual workers. They remind me of Charles Sheeler’s arresting photographs of the Ford River Rouge plant. Waigreich’s work photographs are currently on view (until December 10^th at Washington D.C.’s Art Museum of the Americas in a show called “On Labor”). Photographer Carl Corey’s photographs from his collection Blue: Portrait of an American Worker are in color, and provide a more literal “close up” of the workers themselves. One of Corey’s goals in taking these photographs, as he explained in an interview with The Wooly Pulpit, was to advocate for American workers: “my hope is awareness will breed support for the American Worker.” The workers look proud, even stoic, and the photographs remind me a bit of the classic worker portraits taken by Milton Rogovin.

Current TV’s profile of the American worker. During the lead up to the election, Current TV posted a new worker profile every day for 30 days. Thirteen of the workers profiled were women, and 10 were African American, Latino, or Asian. The jobs covered included cop, firefighter, graphic designer, bus driver, Boeing mechanic, bartender, CPA, nurse, farmworker, and web developer. The profiles included detailed interviews, includingquestions about union membership and political leanings. Though not all of the workers profiled were working class, the interviews echoed common themes. Everyone who had health insurance was grateful for it, and everyone who did not have it wanted it. When asked “what is the one thing you could change about your job if you could,” almost everyone wanted better pay and/or benefits. One of the most inspiring quotes came from the Boeing mechanic, Monico Bretana, the highest paid union worker in the group: “I would have to say that I’m a working guy; I work for my money. Just like everybody else, I just want to be treated fairly, I just want to have a decent living wage, decent benefits to cover me and my family, and the union has provided that for us. And I want people to know that unions are not what people perceive anymore. We’re here to help the middle class, we’re here to help maintain a good living standard.”

Now doesn’t that sound sort of like the 1950s? Of course, I don’t want to go back to the 1950s altogether. I don’t want to go back to Jim Crow America, or Operation Wetback America, or Mad Men America. But when it comes to taxes on the wealthy (can we get the marginal tax rate back to the 1950s rate of 91%?), the tradition of union membership, and images of proud, beautiful blue-collar workers, I would be happy to go back in time.

Kathy M. Newman

Class and the Olympics

By the time you read this the Olympics and Paralympics will be over in London. Both sets of games have been very popular in Britain and have stimulated thousands of column inches of media interest.  In amongst the coverage of sport the issue of class has emerged in a number of different contexts.

Even before the games had begun Londoners’ ire was raised by the dedicated ‘Games Lanes’ dedicated to traffic of the Olympic ‘family.’ In amongst the grumbles was a noticeable critique that these transport arteries seemed to be more about ferrying elite members of the ‘family’ from their five-star hotels in West London and less about getting competing athletes to their venues –the West end of London has always been the poshest part of the city due to the prevailing winds.  Industry, and the majority of working-class communities who worked in them, tended to be planted in the East end where the Games were located. When challenged on this exclusivity, Jacques Rogge, President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), rather bizarrely claimed that his Committee were workers and that “We are working-class people.” Defending the IOC encampment in the Park Lane Hilton, Rogge made an argument about workers like himself and his colleagues  needing adequate conditions and was quoted as saying “I am sorry but in three-star hotels you will not find the facilities there are in this hotel: conference rooms, simultaneous translations- this is something only more upscale hotels have.” To be fair, I find the same myself.

Arguably the most interesting and deeper reflection on class came in the debate stimulated over the social and educational background of British medal winners, especially the over-representation of privately educated medal winners among the successes. This sparked a debate about the lack of opportunity of access less well-off children and young people get to certain sports, such as rowing and especially the equestrian events. While the privately educated make up 7% of Britain’s population, privately educated athletes at one point had won over 60% of the medals.  This proportion later improved, but not before Conservative politicians and media attempted to explain the disparity by claiming that this was proof that state schools discouraged competitive sport rather than structural and cultural issues around access to training facilities and equipment.

Class, or rather working-class history, was reasonably well represented in the Olympic opening ceremony. While it may have left most of the world’s viewing audience mildly bemused, the show included many nods to working-class politics and class struggle. Most obvious was the part of the performance where the utopia of pre-industrial rural England was swept aside by the industrial revolution. Stovetop-hatted capitalists gathered in small huddles surveying the creation of dark satanic mills, or at least their chimneys, tended to by a grimy faced proletariat. Again, some right-wingers saw this and other aspects of the show as evidence of left-wing bias, and the director being ‘anti-business.’ Even more interesting was the way this narrative of work and class was conveniently constrained to the representation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As an amusing postscript to that aspect of the performance, the next day three of the volunteer actors who played the ‘factory hands’ in the ceremony were interviewed on national television. The curious interviewer asked the group what their day jobs were in real life. Their individual answers gave a fascinating insight in to the changing nature of Britain’s economy: the first was a civil servant, the second an accountant, and the third worked in ‘new media.’ So Britain’s industrial workers of the past were played by middle-class workers of the new economy.

There were, of course, many real workers on site during the opening ceremony, most notably at its climax where construction workers involved in building parts of the Olympic Park at Stratford formed a guard of honour for the Olympic flame as it entered the stadium. Of course, the comprehensive commentary didn’t mention that at least one of the construction firms working on the site is under investigation for blacklisting workers and compiling a database of those who raised concerns about workplace health and safety. These included trade unionists as well as non- activist workers who had particular concerns.  More embarrassing for the Conservative Party was that at least one of the firms involved in this illegal activity – Sir Robert McAlpine – was a substantial corporate donor to the Party.

One final aspect of class around the Olympics, and especially the Olympic Park itself, can be seen in the erasure of evidence of working-class culture and industry on the site.  Much of the commentary on the games focused on the role of regeneration of what was usually referred to as a “post-industrial wasteland.” This ignored the fact that many working-class jobs and working-class communities had been moved after the games were awarded to London back in 2005 in order to make room for the Olympic Park. While this erasure was not of the scale seen in Beijing, it was nonetheless notable. The immediate site itself and the wider Lea Valley area that surrounds it were home to a range of industries, including the manufacture of armaments, and this was  where gasoline was first refined. St. Etienne made a fascinating film about the area in 2005 called What have you done today, Mervyn Day? More historically but also ignored by commentators,  the games sat directly on the site of what was once the largest locomotive construction and repair shops in the world, where for a century and a half thousands of workers had built and maintained rolling stock for the Great Eastern and other railway companies. The local authority has an oral history section featuring some of those who worked at the site.

So class was strangely both absent and present at the London games in the summer of 2012. At times it was portrayed in graphic historical terms but not as something live in the present. Working-class culture, protest, and struggle were boxed off in a past represented by bygone industry, the parts of industrial workers played by members of the new economy. But for those of us who take the time to look, working-class culture surrounded both the sport played in the venues and the sites themselves.  In four years time it with be Rio’s turn to host the games, I wonder what stories of class will be told or left untold then. But as Jacques Rogge claims, the IOC are “working-class people,” so surely we can count on them?

Tim Strangleman

The Trouble with Work: Rethinking “Working Class”

Last month, I blogged about the challenges of teaching an analysis of the US class structure that recognizes our sizeable working-class majority and critiques the myth of the broad inclusive “middle class.”    I closed by questioning what’s at stake for us in posing this analysis and how effective it can be in the present moment for teaching and political organizing.   A number of you responded, including a forceful reminder that Karl Marx had some important things to say about classes.   A point well taken, since Marxism still provides, I believe, the most comprehensive account of how class operates in society, including culture, politics, and economics.

By leaving Marx out, I sidestepped his analysis of how class antagonism arises within the relations of production under capitalism, based on the exploitation of workers’ labor power.  I also avoided the complicated question of the status of middle classes in a Marxist account — a topic addressed, as another respondent reminded us, by sociologist Erik Olin Wright, who has written about the “contradictory location” of the middle classes, who share properties of both capitalists and workers.   Another commentator, Richard Butsch, described a college sociology course in which the concept of “ownership of the means of production” is used to explain relative class positions and life chances.    This approach would make clear that even workers whose income provides a middle-class “lifestyle” are working-class in relation to the means of production, which is owned by capitalists.

This is the case made by many of us in Working-Class Studies for the importance of deploying an accurate class vocabulary.  In “Politics and the American Class Vernacular,” Jack Metzgar wrote that the “task of working-class studies should be . . . to constantly probe what users [of the vernacular] mean when they say ‘middle class,’ and to use ‘working class’ consistently and rigorously to refer to all those purported members of the middle class who are not middle-class professionals.” Metzgar argues that this confusion over who is middle class matters because it negatively affects working-class interests in politics and public policy. I would add that the American class vernacular tells us little about how classes are formed and maintained within capitalism, much less about why class relations need to be radically transformed.   For that, we need the concept of the working class.

Using the term “working class” has important benefits, but I also want to pose some difficulties arising in its stress on “working.”

A prime benefit of the term is its recognition of the position of the working class as both a creation of capitalism and a source of resistance to it.  The key idea it contains is that this is the class that actually does the work, producing the goods and services society needs.  In Marxist terms, the working class sells the labor power from which the owners of the means of production extract the surplus value that becomes capital.  The workplace is then the primary location of the exploitation of human labor and of the subordination of the worker to the will of the capitalist.  Consequently, as Michael Denning puts it, “The workplace remains the fundamental unfree association of civil society.”

By the same token, it has also been the site of resistance through the collective refusal to work or the demand to alter working conditions.  Always, at work, whether we know it or not, we are engaged in a political situation, a struggle over power and freedom.  We are better able to explain this systemic class conflict, the argument goes, when we recognize the position of the working class within capitalism.

But are there also difficulties in our use of  “working class,” apart from its lack of currency in the popular vernacular?  “Working people” are after all not the only people who work: members of the professional middle class work pretty hard, as, I imagine, do some hedge fund managers.  Some of my students draw the ready conclusion that all who work are by definition working class, and conversely, that those who don’t are not.  Stressing the “working” status of this majority class can obscure the fact of joblessness and the distress it causes, as a recurring hazard of being working-class.   Furthermore, because unemployment often leads to poverty, unemployed workers become aligned with “the poor,” who in the American class vernacular constitute a separate non-productive class at the bottom of society. As Metzgar puts it, “The poor are in fact part of the working class, and poverty, near-poverty, and the fear of poverty are an endemic part of working-class life.”

Beyond this problem, there is a deeper difficulty with the concept of working class as it affects our capacity to imagine alternatives to the current regime of capitalist production, with its attendant unemployment and precariousness.   By naming work as the primary source of identity and value, we adopt the work ethic that legitimizes that regime, and we reinforce the subordinate position of the working class within it.   Working is what workers do; when they are not doing it they are deficient in their identities and in their social contribution.  Our personal worth is thus massively over-identified with the work we perform.  Conversely, the focus on the work we do delegitimizes the many other activities (cultural, social, familial, sexual, political) through which we create value, pleasure and freedom, for ourselves and others – all of which require time away from work.

Kathi Weeks develops this critique of the “work society” in The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries (Duke UP, 2011).   Weeks asks, “Why do we work so long and so hard?”  –  particularly when most jobs are boring and repetitive, unfairly remunerated, and coercively bossed.   In addressing this question, she looks not only to the exploitive relations of production Marx analyzed, but also to the Protestant work ethic and its contemporary incarnations.  She shows how deeply the work ethic is embedded in our social thinking and how it serves the interests of capital by promoting our allegiance to work as “a basic obligation of citizenship.” She also demonstrates also how a “laborist” version of the work ethic has been adopted by the working class, to the extent that socialism came to represent “a vision of the work society perfected rather than transformed.”  In envisioning alternatives to the regime of the wage labor society, therefore, Weeks finds it “difficult to see how the working class can serve as a viable rallying point in the United States today.”   Similarly, “it seems unlikely that socialism can serve as a persuasive signifier of a postcapitalist alternative.”

In place of class struggle, Weeks proposes a struggle over the politics of work itself, which would encompass the goals of both freedom in work and freedom from work.  Since, as Marx wrote, “waged work without other options is a system of ‘forced labor,’” the solution to current economic problems would not then be full employment, on either a capitalist or state-socialist model, but in Weeks’s terms, “an alternative to a life centered on work.”   Resources for such “antiwork politics” and “postwork imaginaries” can be found, she suggests, in the theories and projects of European autonomous Marxists and their “refusal of work,” and of 1970s American feminism with its critique of the gendered labor of social reproduction – which, although unwaged, is essential to capitalist production.

Weeks is also interested in rehabilitating the practical usefulness of utopian thinking. She discusses proposals that offer alternatives to a life dominated by work, such as the 30-hour work week and the provision of a guaranteed basic income to all.  These proposals are utopian in that they envision a profound transformation of the work society in the direction of greater equality and freedom.  But they are not therefore impractical.  I don’t have space to recite the times and places in which these projects have been proposed and tested – a Google search took me well beyond Weeks’s examples.  But clearly there is not now – if indeed there ever was – an authentic need for all capable adults to engage in long hours of alienating labor.  Advances in technology and productivity suggest that basic needs could be met if all those who wish to work worked far fewer hours and if the products of their labor were more equitably distributed.    But then, what would the working class (and the middle class for that matter) do if they weren’t working (or looking for work) all the time?  Imagine the possibilities!

Nick Coles

Take Back Your Vacation

Perhaps you have seen this television advertisement? A plump, mousy woman in a khaki skirt, a yellow top and an emerald green sweater jumps up on her desk. She addresses her co-workers, using her telephone as a megaphone: “Can I have your attention? I have 47 vacation days. That’s insane.”

She looks around earnestly, and one of her co-workers, an African American woman, glances up uncomfortably, as the office “Norma Rae” continues on her soapbox: “I have been saving them and earning them for what. To be a bridesmaid? We come in day after day. That ends now. Let’s take back our summer. Who is with me?” She scribbles “Vacation Now” on a piece of paper and holds it up for all to see. A lone man claps for her, nervously, and a white male co-worker, who has been watching the scene from his private office, lowers his window shade. The thirty-second advertisement is over, and the sponsor flashes on the screen: “Only Las Vegas. VisitLasVegas.Com.”

This ad is one of many right now, from various companies, that encourage workers to do a number of “radical” things, like use their vacation days or take a lunch break. In a television advertisement for McDonalds, one worker stands up defiantly and announces she is going to lunch. A female co-worker warns her, “Those days are gone now.” But an Asian American co-worker stands up and pulls off his employee badge. “I’m going with you. I don’t want to be chicken. I want to eat it.” An Applebee’s campaign features an inflatable decoy to make it look like you are sitting at your desk so you can sneak out to lunch.

These ads have received much attention. The New York Timesdevoted an article to them, and bloggers have been weighing in as well. Most agree that the advertisements are a cynical ploy to tap into worker frustration in order to sell the worst kind of corporate fare—McDonalds, Vegas hotel chains, Applebee’s, and Gold Peak Tea (which is offering a competition for $100,000 for “one year off” from your job).

Of course, cynical manipulation is the business of advertising, and these ads are particularly good at it. The VisitLasVegas.Com series presents a cast of white-collar workers who are trapped in cubicles, chafing under the tyranny of the trilling ring of the office phone or the constant ping of the email. One employee, when awarded a certificate for never having taken his vacation days, throws a monster fit, kicking over plants and ripping up his prize. Another employee who can’t stand his job executes a dramatic getaway—using a grappling hook to rappel through the ceiling tiles. The ads are quite funny, and they pound away at a singular theme: your job sucks, and you must find a way to get to Las Vegas.

It is easy to see these ads as an attempt by corporations to turn employee dissatisfaction—up sharply since the recession—into profit. As Harry Katz, dean of the Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations argues, “It’s an effort by management to co-opt the Occupy Wall Street spirit and redirect it to promote its product.”

On the other hand, as I argued in my first book, Radio Active: Advertising and Consumer Activism, there is always the teensy weensy possibility that ads like these might get people thinking about doing something truly radical. Isn’t it possible that in playing on consumers’ sense of being beaten down by their jobs, these ads have to ignite a modicum of resentment against the system?

Perhaps a more persuasive argument is that these ads work like a cultural trap door. As much as they might seem to re-direct worker dissatisfaction—they also do much to reveal it. And hiding behind the humor in these advertisements are some surprising truths about the 2012 American worker.

1) We don’t take lunch breaks. 65% of American workers eat at their desks, according to a recent study by a company called Right Management. Within the corporate world there are two schools of thought on this issue. One group, represented by a company called the Energy Project, argues that workers are more productive when they take a real lunch break. According to their  website, Energy Project has helped companies like Google keep their workers from burning out. At the other end is a corporate treatment like that reflected by a recently settled lawsuit, , involving a woman who was fired by Target for taking her lunch break late three times over 18 months—once by two minutes. She won $275,000 in damages.

2) We don’t use our vacation days. Right Management found that the average American worker leaves 11 unused vacation days by year’s end. Why is this? The survey revealed that workers are afraid of getting fired. John de Graaf, director of the organization Take Back Your Time, wonders why the US is so different from other Western countries. “This is the only wealthy country in the world that does not guarantee any paid vacation time,” de Graaf said. “Every other country understands that this makes people healthier and creates a better workforce.”

3) We don’t (or can’t) call in sick. Only one third of the lowest paid 25% of working Americans get compensated if they have to stay home sick. Even in the private sector, only 60% of American workers have paid sick leave. Who has the best sick leave policies? Most unionized workers, and, especially, unionized government workers—like teachers, cops and firemen—whose pay, benefits, and right to belong to unions have been especially under attack in the last year.

4) We get fired for whatever. If you work for Chick-fil-A, you might be fired if you don’t attend your boss’s weekly prayer breakfast, even after you donated a kidney to your boss. And here’s another great list of things you could be fired for, including shaving your head, wearing a Packers’ tie in Chicago, and tweeting a joke from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. You can keep up with these and other outrages at Corey Robin’s blog.

When I watch these ads, I am compelled to think more deeply, and depressingly, about the current state of the American worker. I am personally shielded from many of these outrages, as a tenured professor at a prestigious university. But I will confess that I do often work on vacation. I am writing this post a few hundred feet from a wild rocky beach on the Pacific Coast. But before I run off to play with my kids, let me close by wishing you the best possible summer vacation, or just any vacation, during these dark times for American workers.

Kathy M. Newman

Work and Taxes

If I earned more than a million dollars a year, I would be for the Buffett Rule – not for the reasons that famous billionaires like Warren Buffett and George Soros are for it: because it’s just fair.  I’d be for it because in the long run it would save me money by distracting the public from seeing the roots of class warfare as it is fought in the U.S. Tax Code.

The Buffett Rule says simply that anyone who earns more than $1 million a year should pay at least 30% of their income in federal income taxes.  Legislation to institute this rule is supposed to be voted on this week in the U.S. Senate, sponsored by Democrats and ballyhooed by the Obama Administration.  It won’t pass the House, of course, so it won’t actually affect anyone’s taxes, but it’s a helluva good campaign talisman for Obama and Democrats to run on.

The point of the Buffett Rule is to avoid the kind of obvious inequity that Warren Buffett pointed to in his August New York Times op-ed:  In 2010 Buffett, the second richest man in the world, paid only about 17% of his income in federal taxes (income and payroll taxes) while the 20 people who work directly for him paid an average of 36% of their much smaller incomes.

The Buffett Rule was not devised by Buffett, but by the Obama Administration.  And the first thing that should be noted is that even at 30%, Buffett and other millionaires will still be paying less than the 20 people who work for Buffett, including his now-famous secretary.  More importantly, however, Buffett was clear about why he and other investors paid lower effective tax rates than most workers: income that you do not work for is taxed at a lower rate than income you do work for.

Why this isn’t a scandal in a country that supposedly prides itself on its “hard-working people” is a mystery to me.  If you get your money by investing in stocks and bonds, your income is taxed at a 15% rate because it is unearned.  What’s more, you pay nothing in payroll taxes (i.e., nothing for Social Security and Medicare) because you’re not on anybody’s payroll.

Buffett himself actually still works and draws a salary, and on that part of his income he pays a top rate of 35% and regular payroll taxes on the first $110,000 of that income. But the vast majority of his income comes from investments – capital gains and dividends – and on that part he pays only 15% and no payroll taxes.  Here’s how Buffett explains it: “If you make money with money . . . your percentage may [even] be a bit lower than mine.  But if you earn money from a job, your percentage will surely exceed mine – most likely by a lot.”

Fair shares and percentages aside, the U.S. Tax Code literally says that investors are more valuable than workers, and therefore, should be taxed less. Or it says that investors need more encouragement to invest than workers need to work.  In any case, our tax code fairly screams that only losers and suckers work for a living.

The obvious remedy to this moral abomination is to tax capital gains and dividends (called “unearned income”) the same as wages and salaries (called “earned income”) on the principle that you should not be taxed at a higher rate for earning your income.  That’s how it was after Ronald Reagan signed the 1986 tax reform law, and for most of our history before that.  It was under Presidents Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II that investor privilege was installed in our tax code.  (See the Citizens for Tax Justice’s recent report, “Policy Options to Raise Revenue.”)

Taxing capital and labor income at equal rates would produce much more revenue for the government: $53 billion a year, according to Citizens for Tax Justice, while the Buffett Rule would raise only $17 billion (with other estimates being as low as $5 billion).  You can see why as a greedy, but rational millionaire I’d embrace the so-called Buffett Rule in order to shift the focus away from the basic class bias of our tax code.

There is a theory behind privileging investors by taxing them less.  Namely, investors are “job creators,” and any additional taxes on them will lead to less investment and, thus, slower economic growth, fewer jobs, and even higher unemployment than we have now.  I’ve critiqued this theory before, giving it some credence when it was initially articulated in the 1970s, but showing how it is clearly irrelevant today because investment lags not for lack of money (of which investors have plenty), but for lack of consumer demand that would give investors a reason to invest.  But that’s just me.  I’m not one of the greatest investors of all time.  Here’s what that guy said in his August op-ed:

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, tax rates for the rich were far higher . . . . .   According to a theory I sometimes hear, I should have thrown a fit and refused to invest because of the elevated tax rates on capital gains and dividends.  I didn’t refuse, nor did others. I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone — not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77 — shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain. People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off. And to those who argue that higher rates hurt job creation, I would note that a net of nearly 40 million jobs were added between 1980 and 2000. You know what’s happened since then: lower tax rates and far lower job creation.

There are a lot better rules to derive from Buffett’s puckish op-ed than the one the Democrats are using to embarrass Mitt Romney, whose effective tax rate of 14% is even lower than Buffett’s.  Taxing all income at the same graduated rates, for example, would be both simpler and fairer.

While I was writing this post, the Obama-Biden campaign sent me an e-mail asking that I sign a petition supporting the Buffett Rule.  I signed it because Obama’s tax policy is way better than Republicans’ proposed tax cuts for the wealthy.  But the at-least-30%-for-millionaires is a political gimmick without principle, and it leaves in place a tax code that dishonors work and the people who do it.

Jack Metzgar

Chicago Working-Class Studies

Welcome to the Informal Economy

It’s graduation season, and while commencement speakers encourage graduates to work hard and pursue their dreams, most new grads are worried about finding a decent job.  All their professors can suggest is that students use internships to gain valuable work experience and be prepared to have five jobs by the time they are 35.

Here’s the reality, grads: things are worse than you fear.  When you’re 35, you could still be looking for a good job. You’ll have a family to support, your salary could well be lower than you expect, and you’ll receive little or no pension contributions or health care benefits. Taken together, episodic work with little opportunity for advancement and poor wages and benefits reflect the characteristics of work life once found largely in the informal economy but now becoming all too common in the formal economy.

According to UNESCO, the informal economy involves the largely unregulated exchange of goods and services and is characterized by intermittent employment, short job ladders, and substandard wages and working conditions.  Historically, the informal economy has referred primarily to workers paid under the table, like many nannies or home health care aides, itinerant workers, and those involved in black market exchanges. But increasingly, the conditions of the informal economy are being experienced in the formal economy, though they are generally ignored or hidden by such glossy terms as consulting, internships, subcontracting, and privatization.

The economic crisis is pushing more people into the informal economy. USA Today reported that in 2010 only 45.4% of Americans and 66.8% of men had jobs. Both statistics are among the lowest on record, and now the United States has a lower share of prime age men in the work force than any other G-7 nation. According to David Brooks, writing in the New York Times, this is the result of early retirements, work disability, the decline of manufacturing jobs, and poor job fits in the new economy. Regardless of the reasons, the number of unemployed and underemployed people, who are most likely to participate in the informal economy, is growing in every sector and profession as the recession/regional depression continues. Many of those who do not have jobs are finding ways to support themselves, at least minimally, within the informal economy.  They have no choice.

At the same time, employers are taking advantage of desperate, young, less expensive workers, often hired on a temporary or contract basis, who are displacing older professional and non-professional workers or simply allowing companies to avoid committing to permanent hires.

As companies resist hiring full-time workers, and as young workers clamor for any possible job opportunity, internships have become increasingly significant in American business, and informal economy conditions apply to many internships.  According to the Economic Policy Institute, 1 to 2 million people today work as interns in the United States, and most are either unpaid and poorly-paid. In his book, Intern Nation, Ross Perlin reports that internships usually don’t conform to labor regulations, contribute to socio-economic inequalities, and rarely provide a useful job ladder – conditions that are typical in the informal economy. Offering college credit in lieu of an hourly wage does not necessarily mean that employers are free to ignore wage and hour restrictions. The U.S. Department of Labor has begun to take note of these problems and plans to increase regulation of unpaid internships nationwide.

Another growing category of informal workers is home-based caregivers. While some work through employment agencies, home-based employment is largely unregulated and dominated by non-white and female workers who earn low wages and no benefits. As more families need help caring for young children, disabled family members, and aging parents, demand for home-based care services has grown. Personal home and health care employment now exceeds 3 million and is projected to be the largest sector of new job growth between 2008 and 2018, with 1.1 million new jobs.  In the last decade, these workers have won union organizing and bargaining rights, but Steve Early reports that there is bi-partisan support among many current governors to rescind executive orders or pursue legislation undermining these workers’ attempts to improve their working conditions.  As a result, their wages will decline, their working conditions worsen, and they will sink even deeper into the informal economy.

So what is to be done? A number of labor and social justice organizations have formed the Excluded Workers Congress with goal of organizing workers in the informal economy, connecting them with grassroots movements, and developing strategic responses to informalization. They aim to challenge discrimination in the current labor market, build support for ongoing campaigns to improve working conditions, expand labor rights for excluded workers, and advocate for policies that support all workers’ right to organize.

Acorn International’s founder Wade Rathke suggests that there is no quick fix for the informal economy.  Rather than offering programs to retrain informal workers to enter the shrinking formal economy, he argues, we should “embrace the informal economy and engage in survival strategies that provide sustainable livelihoods and community redevelopment.” With short timelines and low investment, communities could organize  “localized informal workshops, training, production, marketing, and sales that can provide dignified, remunerative work for millions.” The work would range from home repair and rehab to food and bio-diesel production to recycling and technical repair services. He also advocates social networking to facilitate the sharing of job information, dispatch, and distribution and micro-lending adapted to broader social and community purposes. Put differently, he thinks the solution to the problems of the informal economy lies in changing the conditions of the work, not the workers.  Rathke wants to make work in the informal economy legal and formalized.

Most certainly, Rathke’s ideas may seem out of the box in advanced economies that often look for quick fixes. But as we in Youngstown know from more than 30 years experience, large-scale, structural economic problems don’t have easy solutions. On the other hand, the solutions Rathke advocates have helped alleviate poverty in developing nations. They may offer a more sustainable model of economic recovery, one that acknowledges significant structural and social changes.

That doesn’t offer much immediate hope for this spring’s graduating class or those being displaced within the formal economy.  The jobs outlook remains bleak.  But their long-term prospects might be better if, instead of normalizing the poor working conditions of the informal economy, we organized to ensure decent wages, reliable pensions, good health care, and greater opportunities for workers across the spectrum.

John Russo, Center for Working-Class Studies

The War on the Working Class

For the last month, the attacks by Republican governors and state legislators on public sector unions in Wisconsin, Ohio, and elsewhere have dominated national news.  The target is not just these unions but on the labor movement in general.  But state bills barring or restricting collective bargaining are just one battlefront in a growing war on the working class – a war that will have consequences for the middle class, as well.

Of course, this isn’t a new war.  Unions and the working class have been under assault since the 1970s, when companies closing plants in places like Youngstown explained their abandonment of American industrial communities as “economic necessity” because American workers were too expensive.  In the 80s, Ronald Reagan led one of the first governmental battles when he fired air traffic controllers in the PATCO strike.  During the 90s, labor regulations made organizing unions increasingly difficult, and employers began to rely more on contingent and part-time workers and to outsource even supposedly secure middle-class jobs. At the same time, deregulation and tax policies helped income inequality grow ever larger as programs to aid the poor were dismantled – by a Democratic president, no less.  Business practices encouraged lowering wages and reducing benefits – moves that many workers, including those in unions, accepted out of fear of losing their jobs altogether.  During the economic crisis of the last two years, hundreds of thousands of workers have lost jobs while corporations stockpile some of the largest cash reserves in history.  Think we’re exaggerating?  Billionaire Warren Buffet doesn’t think so.  He’s said that there is a class war going on in America and that his side is winning.

Despite Federal investigations that clearly lay the blame for the economic crisis at the foot of banks and the finance industry, the working class has become a scapegoat for the country’s economic and social problems.  Like commentators once said of Reagan, business and finance interests seem to be coated with Teflon.  Overwhelming evidence of their responsibility for the financial crisis slides right off.  Former Lehman Brothers exec John Kasich blames public workers, not the financial industry, for Ohio’s crisis, while in Wisconsin, the Koch Brothers are funding Scott Walker’s effort to blame workers for a budget shortfall that he just increased with yet another big tax cut.

Until recently, the attack was largely cultural as journalists, politicians, and commentators focused on exaggerated versions of working-class culture as the source of a variety of social ills.  During the 2008 election, we were told repeatedly that the working class was too racist to vote for Obama, and that claim of rampant racism was all too easy to reprise as the Tea Party started disrupting town hall meetings about health care.  Those ideas held even as Obama won the election and research showed that most Tea Party members were not working-class.  We hear it in the debate over education: if only poor and working-class parents spent more time reading to their kids, we would be more competitive against those well-educated Chinese.  And now it’s about the economy: if only those greedy public workers would stop insisting on getting affordable health insurance and reliable pensions, the rest of us could pay lower taxes and businesses would like us better – maybe they’d even bring jobs back to Ohio, Wisconsin, New Jersey, Indiana, or Michigan.

As states and the U.S. Congress are formulating budget bills, the attack is ramping up, and the ground is shifting.  It’s no longer enough to misrepresent or denigrate the working class.  In order to balance budgets that have been seriously skewed (or screwed) by huge tax cuts, mostly to the wealthy, our leaders say we need to cut services.  States are cutting back on health care programs for the poor, slashing funding for education (Walker’s budget for Wisconsin cuts $834 million from K-12 schools), and raising user fees on things like car registration and college tuition – regressive funding strategies that take a much larger bite out of the household budget of poorer families than of wealthier ones.  The budget bill passed by House Republicans cut funding for health care for poor women and reduced funding of Pell Grants, and Obama joined the fight by cutting heating assistance to the poor.

With these moves, the war has shifted from rhetoric to daily reality.  The result will be ugly.  Cuts in education at all levels will reduce both the quality and accessibility of education.   Cuts in health care will increase incidents of medical problems and could increase the birthrate among lower-income women who would no longer have easy access to the most reliable forms of birth control.  The attacks on public unions will lead to an immediate decline in household income for thousands of families and, in the longer term, less secure retirements.  Increasingly, older people will struggle to get by on reduced pensions.  The result will be increasing demand for state services such as Medicaid, food stamps, and other programs, as well as increases in homelessness.

Meanwhile, the working class and the middle class are losing their voice in the democratic process.  That’s true in the workplace, where both unionized and non-union workers have fewer opportunities to help shape working conditions and both feel increasingly vulnerable to being fired on a boss’s whim.  And it’s true in electoral politics, where the primary national organized voice for the poor, working-class, and middle-class, the labor movement, will lose political influence as unions lose the ability to protect workers’ rights.

No one knows yet exactly how the majority of Americans, who support collective bargaining for public sector workers and who view governors like Walker and Kasich negatively, will respond when these bills finally pass and take effect, or when state and federal budgets undermine opportunity for those who already have fewer resources and options.  Will Americans stand together to protest, as so many have done in Madison and Columbus, and if so, will those protests be any more effective in changing policy than what we’ve been seeing?  What will it take to get us to stand up for social and economic justice, not only for teachers and firefighters but for everyone in the working class and the middle class?  To move us to demand the reinstatement of the American dream? How much will we take before we engage fully in the class war?  The time is now.

Sherry Linkon and John Russo, Center for Working-Class Studies

Unions: Getting Things Done for Workers

I have been a labor organizer for 11 years.  Periodically someone pronounces labor unions as dead or dying organizations, and we all put our heads together to think about ways to save them. Lately, I am much less worried about preserving this version of the labor movement. To me, preserving is about freezing in time and let’s be real: we are already starting to look a little moth-eaten. For most working people unions are something akin to a fairy tale character–either monster or superhero, depending your politics. Very few working-class people are now or have ever been members of a union.

Those unions that are left are under serious attack all over the county. It seems like the answer to those attacks can’t only be self-preservation. A movement of any kind is about moving–about being an instrument for change. It is about reflecting the people and struggle of today. I am very interested in figuring out how to make a labor movement that moves people forward. I keep coming back to a quotation from the late labor organizer and folk singer Utah Philips who defined a union as “a way of getting things done together that you can’t get done alone.” Nowhere in that definition is there a claim that there is only one way to get things done together. For that matter, the word “things” is open many interpretations.

During the last two months I have had little time to think about anything outside of the campaign I am working on here in Oregon. Workers who provide support for people with developmental disabilities are organizing for the first time to preserve the very programs that allow people with disabilities to exercise their civil rights and live independently. We have been visiting thousands of people to ask them what they feel needs to be done. The events in Wisconsin have broken through the bubble of campaign work and captured the imagination of organizers and workers alike. While the battle unfolding in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, and elsewhere is partly about preservation, what has captivated me and others across the country is more than that.

Having a union is not the end goal. It is a means to an end, a tool for working people to have power over their lives and work.   Now someone is trying to take away the best tool working people have for getting things done together. While working people themselves know what they want to get done, Wisconsin has shown a way it may be possible. Instead of becoming mired in an attempt to work through acceptable channels and follow a “process” that would have likely ended in crushing loss, people in Wisconsin took swift and direct action to confront the decision makers who were trying to rob them of their rights. That is a compelling lesson for all of us fighting to build a worker movement.

Recently, when a member of the union I work for was asked why she was volunteering to visit with non-union workers on her day off, she said: “I want to do a difference in the world . . . if not for myself then for others.”  Let’s start there, by redefining the labor movement that way.  What we do as a labor movement is to ‘do a difference’ for working people. If we are serious about organizing the working class, then working people need to decide what needs doing. With so few working-class people in unions we need to go far beyond our membership to ask what needs doing and then really listen to the answers.  Let’s start where every union organizing drive should start: by talking to workers–employed and unemployed–about what they want to improve about their work and this economy.

A union has meaning when it is the expression of what working people want or need to do. What has become glaringly obvious in Wisconsin is that the system we are supposed to use to get what we need is mostly used against us these days. As a result, the labor movement needs to be an adaptable tool, molded to fit the task at hand. The demonstrations in Wisconsin speak to the potential power of people getting things done together and the need to display that power more.

If a union is a tool to get things done, then we have often been going about this all wrong. We don’t need to run around convincing people about the virtues of unions, we need to start with workers’ experience. We need to find out what can’t get done without coming together and create a labor movement that gets it done.

Angela MacWhinnie

Angela MacWhinnie has been a union organizer for 11 years and currently works with SEIU Local 503 in Portland, Oregon.  She is also a member of the Working-Class Studies Association.